Human attention as context for Internet search is immensely powerful. Having an understanding of WHEN a topic was of particular interest allows you to create date-bounded searches that provide more information-rich results and less junk. Which is why it drives me absolutely bonkers that we have a gold mine of human attention records in the […]
Adding a Date Mode to My Google Alerts Replacement
If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while you may remember me talking about the idea of persistent metadata. By “persistent metadata,” I mean that every thing in a physical universe can be identified by WHERE they are and WHEN they are. A person is born here, educated here, works here, moved here, died […]
Remaking Google Uncle Sam (Sort Of) With Mojeek and a CISA Dataset
Do you remember Google Uncle Sam? I can’t blame you if you don’t; Google killed it off in 2011. It was a specialty search offering of Google’s that restricted its results to .gov sites. Very useful! There was a lot of grumbling after it was shut down; in fact, I made a replacement in 2012 […]
Mixing Mojeek and Wikipedia
I really am trying to not get distracted by the Mojeek API, but people keep saying how bad Web search is right now, and the more they say that the more I think of other options. I very much like the way Mojeek offers the ability to “focus” your search by limiting it to a […]
“Barbie’s Dream Google Alerts”
I’ve spent today, around my visit to Granny, making “Barbie’s Dream Alerts” with Google Apps Script and a Google Sheet. 😂 (No, I’m not going to call them that. I’m going to call them Calishat Snaps.) There’s some functionality I’ve always missed in Google Alerts that I decided I wanted in my version, so my […]
Mojeek Goofery
Over the weekend I got a Google Alert with an ostensibly “new” news story that was actually from 2010, so I’ve moved “find a substitute for Google Alerts” to the top of my to-do list. I already have a news API I like okay, but that won’t monitor new Web pages for me — for […]
Gossip Machine As An Information Trap
Hot diggity! I made my first Web monitoring tool! If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while you’ve heard me talk about Gossip Machine. At its core, Gossip Machine analyzes a Wikipedia article’s page views over a given time period and identifies days with unusually high page views. The idea is that audience attention […]
Temporal Topic Explorer
I’ve been spending the afternoon working on my Temporal Topic Explorer, and wow, I think I’m going to be using this a *lot*. I believe in sharing my toys, so if you want to try it too it’s at https://searchtweaks.com/tte/ . TTE takes advantage of dates in URL patterns. Many blogs and news sites publish […]
Perovskite Plain or Solar?
Experiment time! Go do a Web search for ‘hairstyles “totally tubular”.’ Then do another search ‘hairstyles groovy.’ Of course the search results are VERY different in their content, but they do have something in common: they’re oriented to a particular era. The first search will get you lots of mentions of the 1980s in the […]
Concept Lensing
Being uneducated (I rock a GED) makes me constantly aware that my knowledge is extremely limited. This has shaped much of my search thinking. When I approach a certain kind of search problem I assume there is some kind of higher education classification system I’m completely unfamiliar with and some kind of professional vocabulary I […]